A book by Dr Santosh Bakaya
Reviewed by Dr. Sunil Kaushal
Title: Runcible Spoons and Pea green Boats
Author Dr. Santosh Bakaya
Genre: Poetry
Publishers: AUTHORS PRESS
Pages: 103
Price: Rs. 295
ISBN: 978-93-91314-72-9
Runcible Spoons and Peagreen Boats” sits on my nightstand. Written by the highly acclaimed, awarded and lauded poet, Dr Santosh Bakaya.
I keep dipping into it every now and then, savouring and travelling on the nostalgic journeys her words conjure up. It is a book to be treasured.
From the elegant cream-coloured book cover, bordered with fragments of her father’s last letter, with the handwritten address,
so imaginatively designed by her talented daughter, to the last page which reminds the reader of lost childhood, it is poignant poetry about irrecoverable losses.
She recalls multiple treasures lost on the serpentine paths of life, family members now departed, a home called, The Relic, a pet called Nipper, a paradise called Kashmir, adventures and pranks shared with siblings, or even a solo flight, running away from home, the great distance to her favourite tree in the backyard!
Santosh’s book is a nostalgic trip into the changes life underwent when her family migrated to Jaipur from Kashmir, a land steeped in rich culture, fragrant orchards, breathtaking verdant valleys nestled in the laps of majestic snow-crowned mountains; the tinkling and gushing of its once sparkling rivers, now bleeding with wailing moans of bereaved families, carried on breezes hugging sighing pines, silent witnesses.
Interestingly the book is dedicated to Sr. Janet and Sr. Theodora, her teachers at St. Angela Sophia School, Jaipur.
Sr. Janet is fondly remembered for the regular punishment she meted out to this mischievous impish brat, made to stand under a particular tamarind tree, where many a lesson about pranks that misfired, was learnt or unlearnt.
Sr. Theodora, who prophesied, “This naughty girl will write a novel someday,” must be elated watching from other realms her words come true, as the “naughty girl” with gratitude to the teacher, keeps churning out book after book, and what books!
This book is a tribute to her father, an expert in English literature, and an accomplished scholar and professor of English.
Anecdotes and snippets of his life, her special bond with him, his role in shaping this naughty sibling out of five, into the writer Santosh Bakaya, his thesis on Browning, the pain of his writings and poetry sacrificed to the ravages of time, as she wistfully recalls how he stood by the window, of their ancestral house, in Kashmir, twirling his Schaeffer pen, hoping to write that novel with it, someday.
Many memories of her adventurous childhood are replete with images of her father’s towering personality.
The poems are divided into four parts- the first one being Footfalls, followed by Granny, and then Dad & Mummy, ending with the Epilogue: The Incessant Serenades
“That is Me” the second poem in Footfalls, seems to me a true-life sketch of the real Santosh!
“The two-year-old sitting gleefully in granny’s lap, both equal in dental dearth, the pigtailed brat, footloose and fancy-free, a leprechaun in her dad’s opinion, blundering from one escapade to the other,” hasn’t changed much.
“Her eyes still shine with impish glee, and that leprechaun skulks inside,” as she “chortles with juvenile mirth.”
You jump over boulders with her, “wading through streams, dreaming happy dreams” as her shrill treble merges with her dad’s impressive baritone.
How she yearns to travel back in time,
“Then I hear the footfalls of another time
when the sun rose happily in the east every morn,
in that long-gone time,
when life was nothing
but a euphonious nursery rhyme.”
How wistful is this!
“I Still Smell Those Vibrant Flowers”
“There is an itching in the scars of yesteryears.
I sit here as the wilted flowers of memory
suddenly resurrect….”
Sixteen poems that meander through a “Fistful of Confessions” of “filching a handful of peanuts, a giraffe-shaped eraser in Kindergarten”, ricochet against the mighty mountains of Kashmir to the desert land of Jaipur.
She whips up “A Heady Concoction” as easily as wearing “A Pleasing Serenity”, also opening “A Box Of Coins” “The rattle and clang comfort me when I see a string of malice-laced smiles I shudder, get up shrieking.” With an aching heart, she looks at the aquamarine sky, “its pallid eyes hunt for those girls whose giggles have now fallen silent and no longer rise up to it in staccato bursts of mirth.”
**
“The Toothless Grin” opens the second section of this book, which has poems dedicated to her Granny. Santosh expresses her own yearning for her beloved Kashmir through her Granny’s heart longing for her homeland, battling the “intervals of amnesia, hallucinations, a picture of septuagenarian grace” in co-mingling phases of an ageing mind.
“…..my Granny was a Mary Oliver poem
simple but majestic
in her own world, she lived,
forgetful at times,
often humming those forgotten
Kashmiri rhymes.
”In the four poems dedicated to her Granny, Santosh sees her still, clad in a saree donned reluctantly replacing the ‘pheran’, adjusting to many heartbreaking changes after being displaced from her homeland to Jaipur.
“Yes, I often recall that hunched figure of my granny,
bent under the weight of those memories
trapped in that riotous but rickety house
on the banks of the River Jhelum.”
That the elderly were also romantic in their youth, has been portrayed touchingly in the poem “Granny of The Red Roses” when Santosh and her siblings discovered in the folds of her pristine white sari, a bunch of dried red roses, a treasured possession, roses love had wooed her with, culminating in a love marriage!
An endearing poem, it is one of my favourites in this beautiful book.
The third segment of this collection of poems is a tribute to her Dad. It is difficult to put in a nutshell, the large canvas that Santosh paints, in the light of the towering persona of her father, his sense of discipline, the deep involvement with his children preparing them for life ahead, all these responsibilities coupled with his professional brilliance. He introduced Santosh to limericks, which has influenced her writings in a large way.
The pain of suddenly losing her father is so poignantly expressed in this poem. “My Father’s Last Letter to Me”
“Yes, that is a sliver of my papa’s last letter to me,
I don’t even remember whether I wrote a reply,
or if I wrote, was he able to read it
with that impish twinkle in his eyes?
That merry laughter?
For he left us soon after”.
The poems are a touching narrative about the void his absence has created, his “loud carefree laughter, harmless leg pulling”.
His anger spills over against gender or colour prejudice, in the poem, “It’s a Girl”,
“With that first loving kiss,
a successful snook he had cocked
At all those haters
who the birth of another girl had mocked.”
His compassion and tenderness are reflected in these lines
,“…..that tiny bird which had fallen from its nest,
and which dad’s kind hands
had lovingly nursed back to health.”
The robin magpie became her favourite bird when her father said, “You look like a magpie robin with that haircut”.
**
The daughter’s ode to her “Mummy” begins with a prose piece, a moving recall, memories of a time when she was “still Baby, a child to be mollycoddled, to be reprimanded…” juxtaposed against a time when Mummy had passed on, and Santosh is saddened seeing herself wearing her mother’s mantle.
“Was it raining?
Suddenly a tiny drop had appeared
under my eye.”
Eloquent grief!
A pampered child remembers the tantrums her mother put up with, the stubborn brat banging her head against a wall, chasing squirrels, or running down the street where a litter of pups snoozed, and a harassed mother cuffed by this wild child howling for ice cream in bone-chilling December.
By her own admission, Santosh appears to have been a handful too many!!!
Every year 9th of January is a sad reminder of that coldest day of 2015, when an ageing, yet sprightly figure lay on her bed, still smiling in her deep deep sleep, a warm smile as always, turning into a prayer, while her temple waited for the prayer that never came.
The Epilogue: The Incessant Serenades
The book ends leaving the reader with a collage of sepia against the colourful spring flowers in her garden when a toothless kid sat in granny’s lap, and time telescopes,
“The past came trooping into the present,
as I felt the ambient autumn hues
slowly creeping into my bones.”
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Sunil Kaushal is a winner of multiple awards, gynecologist, poet, author, translator, and editor, has been translated into French, Greek, German, Punjabi, and Chinese.
